Jasmin Sandelson

Jasmin is a writer and editor based in New York City. Her essays appear in The Sewanee Review, The Rumpus, The Georgia Review, Longreads, Hobart, and elsewhere, and her first book, My Girls: The Power of Friendship in a Poor Neighborhood (2023: University of California Press)—about the transformative power of female friendships for teens growing up in poverty—is out now.

She is currently finishing a memoir, In This House We Flourish, about coming out later in life, queer girlhood, and the end of a marriage. The memoir is a coming-to-queerness, a reclamation of body and self. It interrogates the power of narrative: to keep us blinkered and ashamed, but simultaneously to liberate and build anew.

A second non-fiction project undertakes a personal reckoning with family mythology, intergenerational trauma, and the many facets of inheritance. Drawing on her professional experience working in criminal justice reform, the project asks: what is accountability beyond retribution? How can storytelling help repair harm?

Jasmin has a PhD in sociology from Harvard University and an MFA in creative non-fiction from New York University. She works as a Research Manager at Columbia University’s Justice Lab.

Originally from London, Jasmin spent five years in Boston before making her way to Brooklyn, which she likes best of all.